I’m excited about this, not only because I love robots, but because it is one of those compelling events that separates the pros from the amateurs.

This has been a long time coming in the industry. Aaron Ross, and his book Predictable Revenue, has started this process by pushing the sales process to be more templatized and automated. Applications like Tout and Cadence, take prospecting templates and allow a rep to send out impressional, but blasted messages, to hundreds of prospects.

In the near future, there will be no need to have BDR’s, these templates can be written by a strong writer who will upload them to one of these services for transactional deals. They will go out automatically and the call to action will be to subscribe, or click through, or whatever will drive a purchase. Many companies are already doing this.

What I love about Tim’s post is how more complex deals will continue to require a trusted advisor. A person who can open doors and help get things facilitated. This is real selling. It will still be some time before this is outsourced to robots.

If you scale up a project where the design process alone takes 90 days, then building takes 180 days and then UAT another 30 to 60 days a project that is designed say between Jan and Feb goes to market in in Sept or October. That is being generous, in some clients things we designed over a year ago are just getting to market. In many ways the design is obsolete as it hits the market.

These companies have continued to play the arms race game for the faster, better technology, outsourcing employees or just generally avoiding employee engagement. Investment more often than not goes to technology, not to people.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to tryto become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was forApple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startuptaking on this problem now has an advantage the original Appledidn’t: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what’spossible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as RogerBannister did, by showing how much better you can do than peopledid before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the ideain users’ minds that a single person could unroll the future for them.

Excellent post by Paul Graham. What is really interesting about this is the comparison to Roger Bannister. It was one of those things that I never really thought of, but like many of Paul’s things kind of whacks you in the head.

My ideas:– Choose Your Own Adventure films where the audience in the theater votes on the plot changes– Embed a localized ad unit in the credits of movies to advertise to people waiting for the post roll at the end of Pixar / Marvel movies.

I thought that this was a great comic about the general pains of tech support.

I think that this showcases a much larger problem. When I was at Zappos a few weeks ago, they really stressed that their goal is not to get people off the phone faster, but to answer the phone faster. It is why every engagement with them is superb.

But the main reason we’re super excited about SOPA, is that your best and brightest entrepreneurs and developers – realising that your version of the Internet is now a sort of steam engine driven version controlled by Congress and unaccountable Corporations (steampunk!) – will now move to Europe to create their next global (“minus USA”, LOL!) Internet company.